Are Vhs Videos Living A New Life In The 21st Century?

When was the last time you played a video tape? The chances are you won't know the answer, except that you would measure it in years rather than weeks or even months. Video has become obsolete, joining the many other ancient technologies that once wowed us but have since become outdated.

Unfortunately videos are not just large and cumbersome they are also difficult to recycle. There are a couple of companies that claim to be able to recycle them successfully, but these are not widespread enough to even make a dent in the vast amount of tapes still in existence. Since they do not rot down they join landfills around the country and stay there, not serving any purpose except to damage the environment.

Fortunately not all video tapes ended their lives years ago. Some are still in use, albeit not in the form they were originally intended to be used in. You may not think VHS videos could be much use at all in modern times, but you might be surprised. There are some very enterprising people about and you might find lots of different uses for your own tapes if you just know how to begin.

For example, if you are short of a coffee table or even a footstool, you could use videotapes in their cases as a starting point. It would be quite easy to build a strong and sturdy double walled footstool with a base by using the videotapes all stuck together. You could then make a lid for it so you could use it as storage, before finishing it off with a cushion on top. It would be a quirky and ideal thing to have if you wanted to watch some television.

The same applies if you want a coffee table. Indeed, many other people have built tables with their old tapes. It would even be possible to keep the top cassette boxes around the edges free to open and close, so you could keep odds and ends and the remote controls for the television in there. Storage is a good way to re-use the boxes themselves. Their size makes them ideal for storing away all those odds and ends that would otherwise get lost in all kinds of places.

Always check your cassettes before doing anything with them, in case you want to do a VHS to DVD transfer of the contents. This would be easier to do if you took your videos to an expert who can perform the VHS to DVD transfer for you. It is the ideal way to preserve any home videos you might still have, before getting rid of the tapes or re-using them in some way.

As you can see, there are lots of ways in which video tapes are still firmly in use in the 21st century. We may have moved on from using them as a way to record television programmes, but they are certainly still useful if you have the ability to make the most of them.